In his commencement address at Notre Dame, President Obama, rather than vindicating the university’s decision against its countless critics, reinforced the validity of the critics’ argument and the wisdom of the U.S. bishops’ policy not to give honors and platforms to those who act in defiance of fundamental Catholic moral principles. For beneath his ever-genial tone, uplifting images and eloquent delivery, President Obama made several major points contrary to the Catholic faith. Packaged as they were, however, in mellifluous pseudo-Christian phrases enunciated in front of applauding Catholic priests by a man adorned with newly-bestowed doctoral garments, few seemed to realize what he was doing — which is why he should have never been given such a hallowed pulpit in the first place. The most audacious part of the address was when the president tried to change the meaning of the Christian faith and draw erroneous conclusions from the false notion. “The ultimate irony of faith,” the president declared, “is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen.” He seemed to be quoting from Hebrews 11:1, one of the most famous definitions of faith found in sacred Scripture, but, whether intentional or not, he got its meaning completely wrong. The passage reads, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is not a “belief” in things not seen — which would be tautological and nonsensical — but the “substance” or “evidence” of things not seen. Faith leads not to doubt, or even merely to subjective conviction, but to objective truth discoverable through revelation and grace. In his challenging part of his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, Pope Benedict described the real meaning of the passage the president was trying to cite. Faith, the pope said, is the “‘hypostasis, the ‘substance’ of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.’ … The concept of ‘substance’ is therefore modified [by the words ‘proof of things not seen’] in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say ‘in embryo’… there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty [and] constitutes for us a ‘proof’ of the things that are still unseen.” So, according to Hebrews, Pope Benedict and the teaching of Christianity, faith does not “necessarily admit doubt,” as the president claims. In fact, true faith and doubt cannot coexist. At the same time, we cannot both believe in the resurrection and doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. We cannot simultaneously believe that God is a Trinitarian communion of love and doubt his existence. This does not mean that a generally faithful person does not have occasional doubts, but these doubts are temptations against faith rather than necessary consequences or companions of faith. Once one grasps how the president is mistaken about connection between faith and doubt, it’s easier to see how he errs in the conclusions he draws from the false premise. He spoke to the graduates at length about the “great uncertainty” of our era with its “competing claims about what is right and what is true.” He warned them, “You will hear talking heads scream on cable, read blogs that claim definitive knowledge, and watch politicians pretend to know what they’re talking about.” He told them that no one can really know any of the most important things for sure, since “it is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what he asks of us. … This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But … it should temper our passions and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate. …” Whether by design or accident, this is nothing but relativism dressed up as religious reasoning. While because of human finitude it is impossible for us to know everything God has planned for us or asks of us, through faith and reason we can and do know much with certainty. Our faith and our rational nature should lead us, fundamentally, not just to continue a debate — which for the president would be a never-ending one about things we can never truly know — but to seek the truth, to understand the truth, and to live the truth. Rather than basing our lives on the rock of Jesus’ words (Mt 7:24), Obama actually proposes the quicksand of the latest intellectual fad: instead of calibrating our culture’s values to the truths discoverable by faith and reason, he says, astonishingly, we need to “align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age.” This relativistic discussion about faith, doubt, and “moral and spiritual debate” contextualizes what the president said about “dialogue” in the principal part of his address. After mentioning the opposing sides of debates on the war, gay rights and embryonic stem-cell research, he asked, “How do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort? … How do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?” He answered the questions with what sounded like a campaign slogan: “Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.” He elaborated, “When we do that, when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do, that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.” Once the president’s premise is admitted that we cannot know with certainty either by faith or reason the truth about what is right and wrong, then all that seems to be left is dialogue to try to find some common ground on which we can agree. No one — especially faithful Catholics — would ever be opposed in principle to dialogue and a spirit of collaboration, but everyone should agree that in cases of some offenses dialogue is not only not enough but counterproductive. There’s a reason why Martin Luther King never sought to engage in dialogue with the Ku Klux Klan, Holocaust survivors don’t try to seek common ground with neo-Nazis and American law enforcement officers are not trying to engage Al-Qaeda in “moral and spiritual debate.” Such dialogue would seem but moral absolutes up for negotiation or compromise. There’s a reason why the president doesn’t call for dialogue on the merits of racism, anti-Semitism and terrorism, because he knows all are evil. He cites Martin Luther King, and not Rodney King, as a hero, because he knows that in the face of racism there’s something more important than all of us just getting along. The fundamental reason why the president called for dialogue and common ground on abortion in South Bend — and set up an elaborate pseudo-religious argument to pretend that it’s all that can be achieved between the “irreconcilable” views on both side of the abortion issue — is because he seeks to draw Pro-Lifers, and Catholics in particular, from a position of moral absolutism about the evil of abortion to one aligned with the “demands of a new age,” which wants unfettered abortion access. His call for an end to “demonizing” opponents — while itself certainly consistent with Jesus’ summons to love the sinner and hate the sin — seems to be an attempt to get others from ceasing to think that abortion itself is diabolical. None of this means that we cannot work with the president to reduce the number of abortions and provide more assistance to women in crisis pregnancies. It does mean, however, that we cannot stop there. Unlike the president, we know by reason that abortion kills an innocent human and by certain faith that whatever we do or fail to do to that child made in God’s image and likeness, we do, or fail to do, to God.